So Hard To Disconnect
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Thread Starter
Join Date: Sep 2015
Posts: 299
So Hard To Disconnect
Hi,
I'm finding it hard to shut off my feelings for my ah. I'm not talking about love, but just the right way you treat people.
I am having a hard time changing my thinking about expectations, and giving up just the way I think one should treat another person.
Just because my ah doesn't treats me poorly doesn't mean I ever want to be that way.
I never want to loose my compassion, and caring and ability to feel these emotions. I'm finding this disease is making me someone I don't want to be.
How do I turn off those feelings for my ah, but continue to be able to be that caring compassionate lady.
I'm having a hard time detailing my emotions.
Can it be done??? I still am mad at myself, for getting sad and angry at a situation, I have no control over. It's hard to sit back and know a bomb gonna go off and there is not a thing you can do to save/ help the people effected!!!
I'm finding it hard to shut off my feelings for my ah. I'm not talking about love, but just the right way you treat people.
I am having a hard time changing my thinking about expectations, and giving up just the way I think one should treat another person.
Just because my ah doesn't treats me poorly doesn't mean I ever want to be that way.
I never want to loose my compassion, and caring and ability to feel these emotions. I'm finding this disease is making me someone I don't want to be.
How do I turn off those feelings for my ah, but continue to be able to be that caring compassionate lady.
I'm having a hard time detailing my emotions.
Can it be done??? I still am mad at myself, for getting sad and angry at a situation, I have no control over. It's hard to sit back and know a bomb gonna go off and there is not a thing you can do to save/ help the people effected!!!
A work in progress
Join Date: Jul 2010
Location: South Jersey
Posts: 16,633
For me, what worked was knowing I'd done everything in my power. You don't have to turn off feelings of compassion, but you can recognize that your compassion doesn't CHANGE anything. He's beyond your help. Prolonging your own suffering does nothing to relieve his. Even if you were willing to give your life for his, it wouldn't work out that way. Your sacrifice couldn't save him.
It also helped me to imagine myself putting him in the hands of his own Higher Power. You can pray for him. What happens with his life is up to him. Maybe it will take having something bad happening to him to lead him to recovery. That's how it works for many alcoholics. Your leaving him may not be enough--it may take a health crisis, going to jail, or a collection of bad events for that to happen. For some people NOTHING seems to be enough, but you cannot possibly know what it might take for somebody else.
The other thing that helped me was to think of leaving as giving him the dignity of making his own decisions about his own life--without me there trying to "manage" it for him. Setting us both free gave me a lot of peace.
It also helped me to imagine myself putting him in the hands of his own Higher Power. You can pray for him. What happens with his life is up to him. Maybe it will take having something bad happening to him to lead him to recovery. That's how it works for many alcoholics. Your leaving him may not be enough--it may take a health crisis, going to jail, or a collection of bad events for that to happen. For some people NOTHING seems to be enough, but you cannot possibly know what it might take for somebody else.
The other thing that helped me was to think of leaving as giving him the dignity of making his own decisions about his own life--without me there trying to "manage" it for him. Setting us both free gave me a lot of peace.
Member
Join Date: Nov 2015
Location: Midwest
Posts: 367
My therapist tells me that feelings aren't right or wrong, they just ARE.
The other day I was telling him about feelings I was having that made me fear that I was a bad person, wishing someone ill will.
He said "Congratulations, you're f***ing human. It's ok."
The other day I was telling him about feelings I was having that made me fear that I was a bad person, wishing someone ill will.
He said "Congratulations, you're f***ing human. It's ok."
Member
Join Date: Sep 2013
Posts: 845
The concept of "detaching with love" helped me a lot. I read about it in the book "Codependent No More." The idea is that you can set boundaries that are healthy for you while still maintaining a loving attitude toward the person or people who you've decided to distance yourself from. This allows me to be loving to myself and also loving toward the other person. I had only understood how to detach with anger before, which was toxic for me and the other person. Detaching with love means, for me, detaching without judgment--wishing the other person well while protecting myself. It means loving the other person enough to accept that they have a right to make their own decisions. It means giving them the dignity, as Lexie mentioned above, to be adults who can decide what their future with alcohol will be without my interference. I came to see that my attempts to negotiate or control the drinking and turn the lives of alcoholics/addicts around were actually arrogant on my part--I wanted to be other people's higher power. It's not for me to manage the lives of other adults. That is between them and their higher power.
Member
Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Midwest
Posts: 11,481
Zircon, I understand your struggle w/compassion/sympathy/pity/getting dragged into someone else's mess. I'm there too. I posted this a while ago b/c I found it helpful. Maybe you will too:
http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...ompassion.html
http://www.soberrecovery.com/forums/...ompassion.html
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Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: Right here, right now!
Posts: 3,424
Zircon-
I agree with everything everyone else has posted.
Some of the answers for me is well wrapped up in Honeypigs daily Language of Letting Go for 12/5 post. My expectations to be loved and treated like the decent human being I am is not unreasonable. What was unreasonable was that I was asking that of a loved one who did not have that to give.
What I have found is that I did that a lot. I got in relationships (friends, family, intimate) relationships with people who "needed" me (I thought), then I was perplexed and confused when they could not meet my needs. Through my recovery work I realized they were "meeting" my needs to try to control and fix stuff around me but not my needs for deep connection. Luckily I had a lot of other good relationships too.
For me when I started to really get this stuff with my recovery it helped me to let some relationships go. I am currently struggling with a different type of challenge around relationships that I suspect I need to let go of also but I have not gotten there yet.
There is nothing wrong with your feelings, except shaming and blaming yourself for having them. This is a really hard situation and you get to be angry, sad, hurt......for as long as you need to. Feelings are important. What you do with them and how you behave around them are important too. Denying my feelings only made me sicker. If I did not feel them they came out sideways.
Finally I struggle to have compassion for myself. Being gentle to me only helps me. I never experienced a alcoholic relationship previously.....of course I did not know what to do, how to feel etc.
I agree with everything everyone else has posted.
Some of the answers for me is well wrapped up in Honeypigs daily Language of Letting Go for 12/5 post. My expectations to be loved and treated like the decent human being I am is not unreasonable. What was unreasonable was that I was asking that of a loved one who did not have that to give.
What I have found is that I did that a lot. I got in relationships (friends, family, intimate) relationships with people who "needed" me (I thought), then I was perplexed and confused when they could not meet my needs. Through my recovery work I realized they were "meeting" my needs to try to control and fix stuff around me but not my needs for deep connection. Luckily I had a lot of other good relationships too.
For me when I started to really get this stuff with my recovery it helped me to let some relationships go. I am currently struggling with a different type of challenge around relationships that I suspect I need to let go of also but I have not gotten there yet.
There is nothing wrong with your feelings, except shaming and blaming yourself for having them. This is a really hard situation and you get to be angry, sad, hurt......for as long as you need to. Feelings are important. What you do with them and how you behave around them are important too. Denying my feelings only made me sicker. If I did not feel them they came out sideways.
Finally I struggle to have compassion for myself. Being gentle to me only helps me. I never experienced a alcoholic relationship previously.....of course I did not know what to do, how to feel etc.
Member
Join Date: Mar 2013
Location: Midwest
Posts: 11,481
What I have found is that I did that a lot. I got in relationships (friends, family, intimate) relationships with people who "needed" me (I thought), then I was perplexed and confused when they could not meet my needs. Through my recovery work I realized they were "meeting" my needs to try to control and fix stuff around me but not my needs for deep connection.
Member
Join Date: Jun 2011
Location: Right here, right now!
Posts: 3,424
There is a running "joke" in my life (high school friends have commented on it, college friends, my adult life friends from work) about my ability to find and make "special" friends.
They are not special because of any physical or mental impairment. They are usually lovely people but man do I have a tendency to try and take it on and make it better for them.......
Right after I got married to my problem drinker, he, and a female friend and I went out to dinner. He got really drunk and it was a bad scene. My friend (not her fault) had a PTSD reaction to his behavior.
She soon got into treatment for her PTSD (and undiagnosed bipolar). My husband did not address his concerns.
They were both so MAD at each other though....and I spent hours trying to fix their relationship, hours of therapy trying to figure out how I could do it perfectly so they would not be triggered or drink etc. Hours trying to address my own addiction concerns so they would not be sliming all over theirs.
Never once in the entire year period that it was an active crisis did I realize that neither of them asked me "How are you dealing with all of this?"
They were not in a place to have that capacity, at all. The act of me taking it all on though (and beating myself up about it forever) kept the focus off of them and I never allowed myself to ask "Was their behavior okay with me? Is it okay that neither of them had enough compassion to ask about my emotional state?
In other words it deferred me from getting real about my relationship with both of them.
As you all know I am no longer married. I do have the friend in my life and at times I have to be pretty careful with that relationship, but not like it was. I am able to put my own self-care and interest in this scenario first.
I think a big part of the reason I am not interested in dating yet, almost five years after divorcing is that I don't trust myself to put my own care first in an intimate relationship.
Part of me is learning how to "redo" life with a new foundation....but I don't yet trust that it is intact. Zircon for me what you are experiencing now was a way to take the old foundation to make way for the new.
Sorry to hijack the thread......slightly different learning but I am definitely dealing with relationship challenges with people in my life who are threatened by my recovery/power/self right now and this is helping me to see how I need to start using some of the same skills I learned earlier in these relationships.
Thanks!!!!!
They are not special because of any physical or mental impairment. They are usually lovely people but man do I have a tendency to try and take it on and make it better for them.......
Right after I got married to my problem drinker, he, and a female friend and I went out to dinner. He got really drunk and it was a bad scene. My friend (not her fault) had a PTSD reaction to his behavior.
She soon got into treatment for her PTSD (and undiagnosed bipolar). My husband did not address his concerns.
They were both so MAD at each other though....and I spent hours trying to fix their relationship, hours of therapy trying to figure out how I could do it perfectly so they would not be triggered or drink etc. Hours trying to address my own addiction concerns so they would not be sliming all over theirs.
Never once in the entire year period that it was an active crisis did I realize that neither of them asked me "How are you dealing with all of this?"
They were not in a place to have that capacity, at all. The act of me taking it all on though (and beating myself up about it forever) kept the focus off of them and I never allowed myself to ask "Was their behavior okay with me? Is it okay that neither of them had enough compassion to ask about my emotional state?
In other words it deferred me from getting real about my relationship with both of them.
As you all know I am no longer married. I do have the friend in my life and at times I have to be pretty careful with that relationship, but not like it was. I am able to put my own self-care and interest in this scenario first.
I think a big part of the reason I am not interested in dating yet, almost five years after divorcing is that I don't trust myself to put my own care first in an intimate relationship.
Part of me is learning how to "redo" life with a new foundation....but I don't yet trust that it is intact. Zircon for me what you are experiencing now was a way to take the old foundation to make way for the new.
Sorry to hijack the thread......slightly different learning but I am definitely dealing with relationship challenges with people in my life who are threatened by my recovery/power/self right now and this is helping me to see how I need to start using some of the same skills I learned earlier in these relationships.
Thanks!!!!!
Member
Join Date: Feb 2013
Location: W Washington
Posts: 11,589
It's hard to sit back and know a bomb gonna go off and there is not a thing you can do to save/ help the people effected!!!
YOU are being affected......and you KNOW a bomb is going to go off.
you have two choices:
A) get as far away from the bomb as possible, before it goes off and secure your own safety
B) throw yourself on the bomb in the short-sighted belief you will be saving others
it isn't like you know the solution and are deliberately withholding that information to his detriment. he can easily defuse his own bomb.......he is choosing NOT to even look for the off switch.
YOU are being affected......and you KNOW a bomb is going to go off.
you have two choices:
A) get as far away from the bomb as possible, before it goes off and secure your own safety
B) throw yourself on the bomb in the short-sighted belief you will be saving others
it isn't like you know the solution and are deliberately withholding that information to his detriment. he can easily defuse his own bomb.......he is choosing NOT to even look for the off switch.
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